Here's what I don't get, regarding Snowden and Manning...
Why do computers in secure areas have accessible USB ports anyway?
During the Cold War they didn't allow 3.5" floppy drives in systems that processed classified traffic unless the system only came with them (such as a Mac, and those were exceptionally rare in high security environments), and then that system had to be in a place that always had at least two people in it. Because you could put a 3.5" disk in your pocket, there was too great a danger of people walking classified information out of the secure area. If you had a pocket large enough to hold a 5-1/4" disk, you'd have never gotten out of the SCIF with it because it would have been too obvious.
Now all these machines have USB ports and you can just waltz out of the SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility) with anything you want...which makes me wonder how many OTHER people have been doing this shit.
The government buys the computers it uses for processing classified traffic from special vendors and that equipment has to meet very high standards to keep the secrets inside; why in FUCK are they putting computers in SCIFs that have this big a security hole in them?
And come on: one drum of epoxy and a drum of filler would have solved all this.
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Last edited Fri Aug 9, 2013, 03:01 AM - Edit history (1)
Didn't Manning use a CD writer? WTF was that doing in a secure area?
I figured the gov't probably bought all the equipment from Dell or somebody in large quantities and the manufacturer loaded it all down with everything they had so they could charge the government the max. Or alternatively charge the gov't extra to "customize" it all by removing CD drives and USB ports from the "standard configuration," so the gov't said to just leave it to avoid the extra cost. Either way, soak the government!
Floppy drives during the Cold War? You know the Cold War basically ended in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War
At that time I think everything was still pretty much mainframes and networked terminals, though I don't really know what the NSA had then. As I understand it, IBM built the NSA.
From what I remember, Manning showed up at the door to the SCIF carrying a CD case with "Lady Gaga" written on it, and in it was a blank CD-R he'd written her name on with a Sharpie. In the good old days, he couldn't have even gotten a factory-made Lady Gaga CD through the security checkpoint. He couldn't have gotten a LOT of things through security; calculator watches were a big no-no. If it ran on electricity, or batteries, or was used with something that ran on electricity or batteries, and you didn't have approval from the site special security officer (who at our site was an asshole who NEVER gave approval to anything except the custom-made earbuds our transcribers all had, and once those came in they didn't leave), it didn't get in.
And yes, floppy drives during the Cold War. The standard PC was called the Agency Standard Terminal Workstation. It came two ways: the ASTW-XT, which was an IBM PC-XT with 10MB hard drive, 360k floppy drive, Hercules mono graphics card, and 640k RAM, and the ASTW-AT, which was a 6MHz IBM AT with 1.2MB floppy drive, 20MB hard drive, Hercules mono graphics and 640k RAM. Strange thing was, they never really standardized on word processors so you'd go into a subsystem that had five computers and you'd probably find four different word processors.
This computer was my baby:
The almighty AN/UYK-43 mainframe. Made by Unisys, and just the right size to fit through the torpedo loading hatch on a submarine because that's how you got it in. These come in water-cooled and air-cooled versions, and ours was water-cooled. If you're looking for cheap entertainment, try telling the new colonel his field station is running in contingency mode because the water pump on the computer broke. We had three spares, but it's a four-hour job to change one.
We're talking about people that can spend a billion dollars on a single plane. Kicking a few million toward making a proprietary drive, even if it was just something so oddly shaped it would be damned near impossible for a hobbyist to replicate shouldn't be that difficult.
Something like this:
with connections on every layer would be impossible to replicate. Well..not impossible, but damned close.